


Purple Prose

by Oodles



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: A Hurricane in Tom Ford, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 20:17:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10557070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oodles/pseuds/Oodles
Summary: Q wonders- why him?





	

**Author's Note:**

> A commission I did about 00Q.

Q would normally have grown bored of men like Bond by now. Men who knew exactly how desirable they were. It was naive. To think you could know your own limits like that was rather childish. Still, there was something about this particular agent that had captured Q’s attention. It wasn’t the broad shoulders, the toned muscles, or the cut of the suit at all. It was his age. 

Too old to be doing the sort of things that agents do. Too old to be so good at it. No, he wasn’t quite  _ good _ , but he went at it with all the gusto of a man half his age. There Q was, body about thirty and mind much older than that, staring into circuitry and reading it like braille. Bond came and went from Q branch like a hurricane in Tom Ford, picking up devices from Q, breaking them hours later, not even kind enough to give the pieces back. Like a pet that knew it was loved, knew well enough to get away with literal murder. 

Sometimes Q thought about this. Did Bond care about the lives he took? Q was fairly certain there was a time when it weighed heavily on the man’s conscience. These days it was harder to tell. There were brief moments– a joke gone too far, where Q saw the light in Bond’s eyes flicker. It never quite died exactly, but there was enough uncertainty that made Q sure that this man was, in fact, human. He hadn’t really been sure up to a point. 

Q liked him best when Bond was hiding his pain. Just out of the medical facilities, freshly stitched, bandaged, cracked and bruised, but Bond stood proud. He would hold his posture even with a broken spine. Q liked to dress the way he did, all leisure, just to rub it in.  _ Yes, I get to stand behind a desk all day while you push your body to its breaking point again and again _ . Bond’s lack of a smile after those particularly harsh missions was, in Q’s opinion, the most handsome time to look at him. Not when Bond was trying to impress, but when he was clawing his way back to normal. Mood paper thin, eyes sharp, voice tight. 

Once, Q went so far as to try to shake the man’s hand fresh after a knife had pierced his palm. Bond accepted without hesitation, and the only indication of the injury was the barely concealed twitch of Bond’s lip when Q took his hand. The contact went on too long, and Q found the impulse to inspect the injury rearing up, but he did not let it out.

Bond sometimes tried to be suave with Q, and Q wasn’t entirely sure why. He’d seen and aided countless agents, and none of them had taken much interest in him. The 00’s were of a certain ilk, and Bond was chief among them. That being said, sometimes Q found himself wanting more from the agent, and, even rarer, sometimes he found the agent hanging around his lab with no excuse. That’s when Q liked to poke his wounds. 

Sometimes Bond pushed back, retained his dominance. Sometimes, though, he let Q search him. 

“What, am I looking like metal to you?” Bond asked while Q searched his gaze. 

“Less metal, more plastic,” Q answered. 

“Flexible?”

“Clear,” Q said. “I can read you quite easily, you know?” 

“Then you don’t need me here, do you?” Bond said, bristling. “You can have a conversation by yourself.”

“I have plenty of those already.” Q adjusted his glasses. “They’re not much fun.”

“But I am?” Bond asked, leaning against the table that separated them. “How can you have fun with a book that you’ve been spoiled for?”

Q held his own arms, trying to look at ease. “It’s not the end that counts. It’s how it’s written.”

This was the time when Bond would decide whether or not to keep playing the game. 

“Tell me how I’m written then,” he said. 

“Lots of hyperbole, for one,” Q answered, feeling a rise in his stomach. 

“Purple prose?” Bond offered.  

Q swallowed. “Quite succinct in your exaggeration actually. 0 to 100 as it were.” 

Bond smirked. “Do you even have a license?”

Q considered the floor for a moment. “No.”

“Would you like to–”

“No.” Q stopped that line of thought as soon as he could. “You will not be escorting me anywhere in a vehicle, 007. Not while I have my wits about me.”

“Perhaps when you don’t then,” Bond quipped, drumming his fingers across the table.

Q could get lost in the scar tissue along his knuckles. His gaze stuck firmly on them. “What do you have to prove to me?”

Bond quirked his eyebrow. “Nothing at all. That’s really the best time to go driving.”

“Stop trying to get me in your car,” Q met his gaze again.

Bond almost smiled. “Stop asking me for a ride.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

The stalemate was set to end there, but neither of them wanted to accept defeat. Maybe that was the tic. They were both unwilling to stop. They both went at it like different men. They both wanted something that they didn’t really need. Q looked at Bond and saw something to pick apart, pieces missing and orphaned and repaired. When Bond looked at Q, he imagined the agent saw a challenge aside from the beautifully-dressed men and women he met on missions. Q was safe in a way that they weren’t, not at risk of death like they were. And that made him dangerous. Someone Bond had to look in the eyes afterwards. Someone he had to work with, not against. 

Q asked nothing overt from Bond, which he knew Bond wasn’t used to, and his voice was quiet with it. 

Bond loudly faced his indecision every time they met. His posture adjusted with the new course of action. 

“Let me look at you,” Q asked him.

“You’re a doctor now?” Bond said, going to straighten his cufflinks.

“Of course not,” Q admitted. “But you’re not a patient, are you? You’re a weapon, and I happen to specialize–”

Bond undid the edge of his sleeve, rolled it up over his wrist and pressed it to Q’s hand. Q wrapped his fingers around Bond’s pulse, felt the rapid increase. 

Q smiled. “Not too fast now.”

“I’ve waited long enough.”


End file.
